From the south, take the exit at Park City and head northwest on Ky. Airports: Nashville, Tenn. Underground, all days are about the same; temperatures in interior passages fluctuate from the mids to the low 60s. Summer brings the most people, and frequent tours are offered.
Though there are fewer tours the rest of the year, they are less crowded. The tours vary greatly; pick ones to fit your time and stamina. All require you to purchase a ticket. Reservations are strongly advised in summer, on holidays, and on spring and fall weekends. For a half-day visit, you might take the Historic Tour, which combines geology with Mammoth's rich history, or the challenging Introduction to Caving Tour. If you plan to stay longer, consider the fairly strenuous four-mile Grand Avenue Tour there are three steep hills, each nearly 90 feet high.
To enjoy the caves safely and comfortably, wear shoes with nonskid soles and take a jacket. Complete your underground trips with a river trip or a walk on the River Styx Spring Trail. The least arduous cave tour 0. A modified version of the tour has only six steps each way plus an optional 49 and is designed for visitors who want a short and easy trip. The toughest challenge is the five-mile, six-hour, belly-crawling Wild Cave Tour, offered daily in summer and weekends year-round.
By reservation. Mammoth Cave National Park is the world's longest known cave system, with more than miles explored. All rights reserved.
Location: Kentucky Established: July 1, Size: 52, acres Under a swath of Kentucky hills and hollows is a limestone labyrinth that became the heartland of a national park. When to Go Year-round. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London.
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Epic floods leave South Sudanese to face disease and starvation. However, a disease called White-Nose Syndrome has drastically reduced their numbers. At the conclusion of the tour, you will walk across medicated mats to help avoid the spread of this disease this disease does not affect humans. Many caves are famous for their stunning array of rocky formations, stalactites that defy gravity and the stalagmites that have slowly been rising up from the cave floor for millennia.
Yes, you can see stalactites and stalagmites here, but they are not the main attraction. A giant roof of shale and sandstone form the upper cap of the cave system in Mammoth Cave. This rocky layer acts as an umbrella, preventing the slow dripping of water into the cave. It is the action of water that forms stalactites and stalagmites. Instead, Mammoth Cave is long series of subterranean rooms and passageways.
Some rooms are enormous and some passageways are just large enough for a small person to squeeze through. The fun of visiting Mammoth Cave comes in exploring these passageways and seeing the sheer size of the rooms. If you really want to see stalactites and stalagmites, take the Frozen Niagara or Domes and Dripstones tour.
There are two seasons of operation at Mammoth Cave: winter and summer. Winter is quieter. Fewer tours are offered, but there are also a lot fewer visitors, so this just may be the best time of year to visit.
I recommend checking the National Park Service website for updated hours and available tours during each of these seasons. Parts of the cave system are undergoing a renovation project.
This is expected to take 18 months, putting the estimated reopening to sometime in for some parts of the cave the Wild Cave Tour and the Grand Avenue are currently closed. I do my best to keep this post updated, but tour offerings can change at any time and I recommend that you get updates on the National Park service website.
You can only visit the cave system of Mammoth Cave on a tour. Take your pick from 15 different tours. Here is an overview of each tour. It can be overwhelming trying to choose from such a long list. At the end of this section, I will give you our recommendations, based on our experience and with talking with several park rangers at Mammoth Cave or skip ahead now. Below is a map of the cave. The caves and tunnels are color-coded by tour.
Note, there are several different entrances into the cave and the tours and tour times include you transportation to and from these entrances. The Historic Tour is one of the most popular tours at Mammoth Cave.
Follow in the footsteps of other visitors who have been touring the cave for the past years. Duration: 1. The 1. Duration: 2 hours Distance: 0. This is very similar to Frozen Niagara, only on this tour you get to journey farther into the cave. You start off descending down into the depths of the cave on a series of steel staircases. All the while, you are walking through drippy, moist caverns.
On this small tour, you will descend down into gypsum-encrusted Cleaveland Avenue, see the Snowball room, and then take an elevator ride back to the surface. This is longest standard tour at Mammoth Cave. This tour ends with a visit to Frozen Niagara and the Drapery Room. However, four hours underground will feel like a very long time for some people. This tour is for those people with mobility issues or a physical disability. An elevator eliminates the need to climb or descend stairs.
On this tour, you will visit sections of the Grand Avenue Tour route. Enter through the Historic entrance, pass through the Rotunda, and enter Gothic Avenue. Duration: 30 minutes Distance: 0. This tour is offered during the busy summer months for visitors who just want a quick visit to Mammoth Cave. Enter through the Historic Entrance, see the Rotunda and explore a canyon passageway on this fast, self-guided tour.
This tour is a combination of the Discovery Self-Guided tour with several elements of the Historic Tour. See the Rotunda, the saltpeter mine, and Indian artifacts. Enter and exit through the Historic Entrance. Travel by hand-held lantern light through some of the most popular and oldest sections of Mammoth Cave.
Duration: 2. This tour is very similar to the Violet City Tour, in that you tour the cave by hand-held lantern and see similar sights. However, this is a shorter tour with less walking so it makes a nice option for those who do not want a long tour. Duration: 3 hours Distance: 1. You have to be between the ages of 8 and 12 to join this tour. This is an introduction to caving where kids can worm their way through narrow passageways and tight spaces.
Highlights include the Rambo Crawl and the Duck Room. Duration: 3. This tour is an introduction to caving for those who are 10 years and older. Enter the world of spelunking and expect to climb through tight passageways that may involve army-crawls and scrambling.
You will get dirty on this tour. This is by far the most adventurous and the most strenuous tour on this list.
On this tour, you get to learn what it is like to be cave explorer. You will belly crawl through tight spaces less than one foot high, scramble over rocks and climb up cave walls, and squeeze yourself through narrow spaces. Obviously, this tour should be avoided if you suffer from claustrophobia.
This tour is very popular and should be booked well in advance of your travel dates if this is on your list of things to do. Tim and I took two tours, the Historic tour in the morning and the Domes and Dripstones tour in the afternoon.
Both were great tours but Tim and I both agree that our favorite was the Historic Tour. Learning the history about Mammoth Cave is surprisingly interesting. Mammoth Cave served a lot of important functions before it became a tourist attraction and it is fascinating learning about this on the tour.
Plus, you get to see the largest section of the cavern, squeeze through tight spots, and see one of the deepest sections, as well. What amazed me the most on this tour was the huge number of metal staircases that were added to this section of the cave. The Historic Tour.
Perfect if you want a 2-hour tour to learn the history about Mammoth Cave, stand in the immense Rotunda, and see one of the oldest sections of the cave. Frozen Niagara Tour. If coming from the south on I, take exit 48 Park City; if coming from the north, take exit 53 Cave City. Good signage on both routes will help you stay on course. Going underground for a tour means going down several flights of stairs and then coming back up them to exit, so mobility is an issue at MCNP.
For that reason, it's important that you check tour descriptions before booking. Plus, some tours have age and size limits and some may require carrying a lantern or crawling. Others are specifically designed for children. Booking tip: When buying tickets, know that this part of Kentucky is on Central Time, as are tour times.
Regardless of the season, weather conditions typically don't impact tours since they're underground: It's usually around 54 degrees inside the caves, whether there's a heat wave or snowstorm outside. So always wear a jacket to explore them — and wear shoes with a nonskid sole to avoid slipping. In summer, the most popular season to visit, the park offers the most cave tours, and outdoor activities such as canoeing, fishing and kayaking are at their peak in temperatures ranging from a high of 86 to a low of You'll encounter smaller crowds in spring and fall, and you can usually expect pleasant weather, with highs in the 70s and lows in the 40s.
Spring rains may cause some flooding that can temporarily limit river access, but foliage thrives on the precipitation. You may have the park practically to yourself in winter, but you'll have fewer tours to choose from and much chillier weather in the 30s and 40s. A ranger-led talks in the outdoor amphitheater is a good way to get context for the park's varied offerings.
The talks cover topics ranging from history to wildflower identification and geology. Even if you buy a ticket online, you'll check in at the visitor center near the cave entrance, which has museum-style exhibitions and historical information about the caves and their exploration, as well as a well-stocked gift shop, an outdoor pathway to the lodge and restaurants, ample parking and restrooms. Except in the caves, you should have reliable cellphone service.
A convenient location just steps from the park's visitor center, cave tours and trails is the reason to settle into the Lodge at Mammoth Cave. It's not a typical national park-style lodge, but rather a collection of basic hotel rooms some ADA accessible and rustic, but comfortable cottages some with multiple bedrooms spread out in an inviting woodland area. Some cottages permit pets. The park's three campgrounds are in leafy, shady locales. You'll find campsites some accessible at the Mammoth Cave Campground MCC , within walking distance of the visitor center, and just eight at the more secluded Maple Springs Group Campground, six miles north.
Both of these campgrounds accommodate tents and RVs, though each has limited sites with electric and water hookups. At Maple Springs, visitors can camp with their horses. None of the 12 tent-only sites at the Houchin Ferry Campground , located 15 miles from the visitor center on the Green River, have hookups, but they have river views. All three have toilet facilities seasonally, and MCC has laundry and showers seasonally, plus an on-site store sells camping essentials.
You can reserve sites at all three in advance at recreation. Mammoth Cave also has two first-come, first-served sites. For a more rugged camping experience, the park has 13 primitive backcountry campsites accessed only by hiking or horseback. MCNP's two restaurants are in the lodge. The breakfast buffet at the Green River Grill will give you plenty of fuel for the day.
The park has six picnic areas in relaxing settings. Look for the largest one, the Mammoth Cave Picnic Area, just north of visitor center parking. It has picnic tables, fire grates, charcoal grills, potable water and restrooms. You can also just find a secluded clearing in a forest.
Go underground. Like most visitors to MCNP, you came to venture down into its caves — and booking a cave tour is the only way to do that. Depending on the time of year, you may have more than a dozen ranger-led tours of varying durations, difficulty and area of focus to choose from. Experience what it must have been like to discover the caves more than a century ago on the three-hour Violet City Lantern Tour. By lantern light, you'll see outcroppings of rock and walk steeps hills created by both man and nature, as well as petroglyphs more than 2, years old.
But note: You must traverse 3 miles of steep inclines and declines on uneven dirt paths, with the limited lighting. The two-hour Accessible Tour covers just 0. Look up in the large Snowball Room, named for the snowball-shaped calcium carbonate formations on the ceiling. On the Historic Tour, you'll see displays about geology, sightless fish, saltpeter mines and other uses for the caves over time.
Rangers usually lead this 2-mile tour, but it has been temporarily switched to self-guided during the pandemic. Rangers stationed inside tell stories and answer questions, though. With discovered miles underground, the tours take different routes and don't necessarily overlap, so book more than one — perhaps a tour heavy on history and one that highlights petroglyphs.
Buy tickets in advance online to save time and make sure you get a spot, as they do sell out. You'll have more options in the summer, but also more people trying to get tickets at the same time.
You'll have less competition in off-season, but also less availability. The park has nearly 85 miles of interconnected and overlapping aboveground trails, most of them accessible by both hikers and those on horseback.
In addition, mountain bikers can ride on three. Many trails tend to be steep, so always ask about difficulty level before hiking one. For one of the steeper trails, set out on the Mammoth Cave Railroad Bike and Hike Trail , which follows the historic rail line. The 9-mile one way , mostly gravel trail starts east of the Green River and winds its way past four cemeteries and a lovely pond, then into a meadow and through densely wooden forest.
On the 1-mile Cedar Sink Loop Trail, get a hint of cave topography without going underground — it leads to a sinkhole where you can see the kind of water that formed the caves. In spring, wildflowers fill the landscape and tree leaves turn red in fall.
The walk itself is fairly easy, but stairs lead down to the sinkhole. The park recently regraded several trails, making them wheelchair-accessible.
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